Cyber Insurance Application Checklist

Are you interested in obtaining cyber liability insurance for yourself or your business? Before you get started, here is a checklist of items to take care of prior to making an application for cyber liability insurance. 

Step one: Gather official corporate documentation

Obtain a copy of your corporate documents for your corporate charter with the secretary of state or whatever the filing document is you have because what you want to do is make sure you have the exact legal name that’s on your corporate paperwork. Also, look up any DBAs (doing business as). If you have a website, address, trade name, or product name you want to get all those identified along with your EIN number, which is your tax identification number. The reason is that your insurance policy is going to be listed in the exact name of your corporation. If there’s something that is entered incorrectly it may not give you the proper coverage that you need. 

Step two: Inventory known technical exposure

Make an inventory of all of the known technical exposure. So, make an inventory list of any servers you have, any routers that you have, and any wifi networks you have because what’s going to happen is, in order to get the best rate on cyber liability insurance, the insurance company is going to look at that list in that census of inventory and make sure that all those devices have the proper security on them. 

Step three: Identify current cyber defense protocols

Take a look and see what procedures you have documented for cyber defense. If you have passwords, if you have protocols for your employees, if you have to factor authentication, if you have procedures for different employees to have different logins to access certain records for example, if your HR department can see all of the private employee information that’s one thing. But if your sales department can also see all of your employee’s personal information that may not be good. So make sure you have a differentiation of access for different parties. 

Step four: Identify external access to your systems

This is extremely important. Look at all of the interactions externally that you have. Meaning, are there any connections from vendors that you have from clients where they can log in and access your system? Do you login and access a vendor system to place orders to arrange for inventory? 

Step five: Inventory used of third-party platforms

Make a list of all of the third-party platforms that you use. Do you have a CRM? Do you have a customer management system? Do you have an inventory management system? Any platforms you have even like zoom or Google documents or your payroll system that are third-party apps that you use to run your business, make an inventory of those. Each one of those is going to have its own security system. 

Now, when you make the application if you have all of this documented. That’s going to give you a certain score with your cyber liability insurance provider. The more documentation you have that you at least are aware of your IT exposure that will get you access to more markets. Your insurance broker or your insurance agent will be able to place you with different markets for that insurance policy. And the more that you are technologically documented, that will enable you to have access to more markets and potentially lower premium amounts. 

So that’s your checklist for beginning the process of cyber liability application. We recommend that you don’t even start the application until you’ve put all those things together. So that that way, when the application is being entered, if you need one of those pieces of information you’ll have it at hand. Or if the application requires that you upload those documents or any of that information or put it in a spreadsheet, you have it ready to go. If you have any questions about cyber liability insurance, you can reach us at our website at RiskCoverage.com.

Have questions about cyber liability insurance? Set up a consultation with a cyber insurance expert today!